my problem was in generating the Thing laundry in that last loop. I had originally thought that objects must all have different names to them lest they interfere with each other. To solve that problem I wanted to create an array that would assign a number to each name on the Thing generated and it would increase. However This solution here shows that it's not necessary to do that. This code works just like I dreamed it would.

I'm not sure that helps...

I was hoping, as Mr. Beans suspected would happen, to find some direction regarding the creation of random objects. Thank you for posting your code, but what about class RobotSE and class Thing? It would be much easier to see if your code accomplishes the same or a similar thing as I would like my code to accomplish.

Here's my situation: I have an abstract class Vehicle with several inherited concrete classes (e.g. Car, Truck, Motorcycle, etc.) and I want to generate random vehicles. I've seen reflection used to obtain an inheritance path (as a List of super classes), but I haven't found anything regarding the use of reflection to obtain a List of subclasses; is this possible?

By the way, Mr. Beans, nice avatar you have there! (I'll get a life now :))

It's best to start your own thread (since it is your question after all), and then link to any related threads. But regardless, your suggestion about using reflection won't work. Perhaps you want to use a factory of some sort here (but this is just a guess as I'm no expert in this by any means).